To follow up on Martha’s post, and revisit the who’s-got-it-tougher-Hil-or-Barack? issue that Gloria Steinem brought up in her “Women Are Never Front-Runners Times Op-ed back in January, I thought I’d give a brief update from the barroom/locker-room and the AM radio dial, several male bastions, as it were.
I suppose this kind of goes without saying, but I’m still amazed at how willing men among men are to be outrageously sexist – in this particular case to hate Hillary as woman. While no one I’ve heard openly says they don’t want a black president (although the rationalizations talk-radio callers make for not voting for Barack would be funny if they weren’t so . . . not funny at all), lots of guys are willing to say, verbatim or in other words, that they won’t vote for “that bitch.”
It scares me to realize that so many men men are so hateful (Again, I breathe a sigh of relief at not having to read responses to my posts from hundreds of Glenn Sacks’ crew.) It scares me to think that while Hillary seems to be pushing a win-at-all-costs campaign that focuses, at least somewhat racist-ly (yeah, that’s right “racist-ly”!), on “electability,” that she may win the nomination and turn out to be far less electable than Obama. It scares me to think of four years of John McCain and two more supreme court justices.
But that aside, I’ve seen and heard white men and women, in public and on the airwaves, who are clearly wide-eyed with disbelief and proud of themselves because they have, at least somewhat, worked through the racism they’ve been raised with/in and are supporting a black man for president.
What I haven’t seen or heard, in the bar or the Y or on radio, is a single man who’s proud to have overcome his sexism by supporting a female presidential candidate. It could be that the tactics of this particular woman in power simply don’t warrant a whole lot of proud converts, but I think it’s also largely that not many men care to find a reason to feel good about themselves for overcoming their sexist upbringings.
What will it take for men to want to be nonsexist? A new brand of feminism, perhaps. Should feminists give a fuck about whether men want to be better men? Yes they should.
